The son of conservative icon William F. Buckley has parted ways with the magazine his father founded for committing a heretical act by National Review magazine standards: endorsing Barack Obama.

In a column today entitled Sorry, Dad, I was Sackedon www.TheDailyBeast.com, Christopher Buckley, a well-known author who also who wrote the back page column for National Review magazine, writes that the uproar over his endorsement last week of Obama over Republican John McCain prompted so much backlash that he offered his resignationand the magazine accepted.

Christopher Buckley, in an exclusive for The Daily Beast, explains why he left The National Review, the magazine his father founded.

I seem to have picked an apt title for my Daily Beast column, or blog, or whatever its called: What Fresh Hell. My last posting (if thats what its called) in which I endorsed Obama, has brought about a very heaping helping of fresh hell. In fact, I think it could accurately be called a tsunami.

The mail (as we used to call it in pre-cyber times) at the Beast has been running Id say at about 7-to-1 in favor. This would seem to indicate that you (the Beast reader) are largely pro-Obama.

As for the mail flooding into National Review Onlinethats been running about, oh, 700-to-1 against. In fact, the only thing the Right cant quite decide is whether I should be boiled in oil or just put up against the wall and shot. Lethal injection would be too painless.

I had gone out of my way in my Beast endorsement to say that I was not doing it in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column, because of the experience of my colleague, the lovely Kathleen Parker. Kathleen had written in NRO that she felt Sarah Palin was an embarrassment. (Hardly an alarmist view.) This brought 12,000 livid emails, among them a real charmer suggesting that Kathleens mother ought to have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a dumpster. I didnt want to put NR in an awkward position.

Since my Obama endorsement, Kathleen and I have become BFFs and now trade incoming hate-mails. No one has yet suggested my dear old Mum should have aborted me, but its pretty darned angry out there in Right Wing Land. One editor at National Reviewa friend of 30 yearsemailed me that he thought my opinions cretinous. One thoughtful correspondent, who feels that I have betrayedthe b-word has been much used in all thismy father and the conservative movement generally, said he plans to devote the rest of his life to getting people to cancel their subscriptions to National Review. But there was one bright spot: To those who wrote me to demand, Cancel my subscription, I was able to quote the title of my fathers last book, a delicious compendium of his NR Notes and Asides: Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription.

One feels almost unpatriotic, entertaining negative thoughts about Obamas grand plan. But it is far from clear that spending oceanic sums of money is the right corrective.
That was, as Tom Lehrer would say, the week that was. President Barack Obama gave his first State of the Union speech. Governor Bobby Jindal gave his first and possibly last Republican response. The president presented a $3.6 trillion budget, and announced that we are getting out of Iraq but not really. And Rush Limbaugh gaveas he put it, fun intendedhis first nationally televised address to the nation.

Just remember the apothegm that a government that is big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

Hold ontheres a typo in that paragraph. $3.6 trillion budget cant be right.The entire national debt iswhatabout $11 trillion? He cant actually be proposing to spend nearly one-third of that in one year, surely. Let me check. Hmm. He did. The Wall Street Journal notes that federal outlays in fiscal 2009 will rise to almost 30 percent of the gross national product. In language that even an innumerate English major such as myself can understand: The US government is now spending annually about one-third of what the entire US economy produces. As George Will would say, Well....

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